Sunday, August 7, 2016

Demographics, Not Doctrine Reason for Church Decline?

Growing up
in an evangelical church, there were two things we knew for certain about the
decline of mainline Christianity.

The
first was that the reason so many United, Anglican, Presbyterian and Lutheran
churches were losing members was because they had become too liberal—something
that was emphasized regularly from the pulpit at my church.

The
second thing was that a similar decline would never happen to us.

It
seems we were wrong on both counts.

In
his forthcoming book,The
End of White Christian America, author Robert P. Jones notes that the
decline of the mainline church is less about doctrine and more about “powerful
demographic changes”—and that it is happening to evangelicals today, too.

Looking
at the numbers, Jones says the proportion ofwhitemainline Protestants
and white evangelicals today is 32 percent of Americans, down from 51
percent in 1993.

The
reason for this change? More and more Americans are leaving organized religion,
Jones says, noting that 20 percent of Americans today consider themselves to be
religiously unaffiliated.

Many
of the unaffiliated people are young adults, who are less than half as likely
as seniors to identify with a church.

This
rejection of organized religion by youth, Jones says, is a “major force of
change in the religious landscape.”

Looking
ahead, “there’s no sign that this pattern will fade anytime soon,” he says. “By
2051, if current trends continue, religiously unaffiliated Americans could
comprise as large a percentage of the population as Protestants.”

For
a long time, this inability to retain youth was mostly a mainline church
problem. And, for long time, evangelicals crowed about it, as I recall from my
own upbringing, blaming mainline decline onliberalism.

But
then, in 2008, evangelical numbers in the U.S. started to drop, too. Today 18
percent of Americans say they are evangelicals, down from 22 percent in 1988.

Not
only has it dropped, Jones says, but this evangelical decline is actually
sharper and steeper than what happened to the mainline churches in the U.S.
years earlier.

Evangelicals
today, he says, “constitute 27 percent of seniors age 65 and older, but only 10
percent of Americans under 30 years of age—a loss of nearly two-thirds from the
oldest to the youngest generation of adults.”

By
contrast, “white mainline Protestants—who saw a reduction in their numbers
two decades before evangelical numbers began to dip—account for 20 percent of
seniors but 10 percent of younger Americans.

“This still
represents a 50 percent decline in market share across generations, but it is
less steep than the evangelical decline.”

A
comparison of the current affiliation patterns of the oldest and youngest
American, he says “reveals that white evangelicals have actually lost
more ground than white mainline Protestants across current
generations.”

For
Jones, “these numbers point to one undeniable conclusion: whiteProtestant Christians—both mainline
and evangelical—are aging and quickly losing ground as a proportion of the
population.”

Of
course, there are still a lot of evangelicals in the U.S., and a lot of
mainline Christians, too. It would be foolish to suggest that organized
Christianity is not still a powerful force in that country, or that the church
will soon disappear.

But
something profound is taking place today in the U.S., and in Canada as well.

Looking
at the Canadian religious situation, in 2013 the Pew Research Center noted that
the percentage of Canadians who identify as Catholic had dropped from 47
percent to 39 percent since 1963, while the share that identified as Protestant
fell even more steeply, from 41 percent to 27 percent.

As
well, the number of by Canadians who are religiously unaffiliated is growing—up
to 24 percent by 2010.

As
in the U.S., it is younger Canadians who are less likely to be religious than
older generations; 29 percent of people born between 1987 and 1995 had no religious
affiliation as of 2011, 17 percentage points higher than Canada’s oldest living
generation (born 1946 or earlier), and nine points higher than Canadians born
between 1947 and 1966.

In
other words, when it comes to future of the church, the old evangelical
certainty of my youth isn’t as certain anymore. We are all in this together—liberal, conservative and everything in between.

1 comment:

This analysis misses a few important things. One is that "evangelical" churches are flirting with leftist ideas, the very thing that so affected the mainline denominations. (I'm not talking about churches on the ends of the bell curve coming to the middle of the evangelical world, a good thing) Perhaps the evangelicals were arrogant/unable to grasp the impact of their decisions despite recent history, as Longacre suggests.

The percentage following non Christian faiths, mostly due to immigration, is a demographic trend that affects stats like percentages.

And then there is the tendency to delay child bearing until older ages. If there is a dip in births among Christians because each generation is delaying child bearing ever later, then there will be a demographic hollow in families and churches.

I'd like to read an analysis of trends that includes the demographic factors listed above, and others. Until then, best not to speculate. But through personal experience I'd say that theological changes are a major driver. When your church veers from the Biblical, why bother going.